informed consent ugh!

Body: 

http://thefeministbreeder.com/is-hipaa-hiding-the-wrong-kind-of-secrets/

pretty interesting.
I enjoyed reading the comments too.
I know from recent personal experience that informed consent just doesn't exist anywhere in medicine. Sure they have the paper you sign- but they don't actually go over what each med, procedure, etc has the potential to do to the body.
It's insane.

This is a very important blog. Young women need to understand this isn’t a problem of “today”. Women have been brutalized by man-midwifery/OB for hundreds of years. Like female GYNS, CNMs are enculturated into the system and can be expected to differ little from the rest of the practice. It is not at all an exaggeration to say that obstetrics sets women up for the surgical specialty of gynecology. And no wonder MDs are usually certified in both.

I found interesting the women (an MD and a L&D nurse) who say, “Well, if you know who to work with and have a solid birth plan, you can have a positive hospital experience.” From my perspective, you should be able to be retarded and with no support system and still be helped to have a gentle, empathic, human birth.

Yes Christine, but ...

these doctors and nurses only operate from the hospital paradigm, where they are in control. Of course what they say is true. You *can* have a good hospital birthing experience. I have had two, that were about 90% as good as they could have been, even though my first scored only about 30%.

But they ignore the out of hospital birth completely because they don't know anything about it, and they don't want to know anything about it.

Most women in rural Western Australia would not dream of having a home birth, especially for their first, because they are in the medical system from the moment of pregnancy testing, if not before. With the increase in age of first confinement many women are into medically assisted reproduction long before they are even pregnant!

It is such a pity that hospital birth is so doctor/nurse-centric, rather than mother/baby-centric. So many of the things they do to a mother in hospital set the stage for intervention, rather than setting the stage for non-intervention.

It is a little bit like putting free salted snacks on the bar at the pub, and making pub meals salty, to make customers thirsty, so they will buy more drinks! Even the presence of pub meals means that drinkers don't have to leave the bar because they are hungry. It also means that people are not drinking on an empty stomach, so they can drink more in one sitting without getting drunk so quickly.

My mother is currently in our local hospital, and has been for a couple of months now. She is not sick. The problem is that there are not enough high care nursing home beds in Australia, so the elderly well are clogging up the acute care beds in hospitals. Because it is a public hospital the Staff are trained either as registered nurses, enrolled nurses or ward assistants. The nurses are trained in lifting patients, and it takes two nurses to lift a patient. The Ward Assistants are not, so patients have to sit around in wet and soiled clothes because there are not enough trained staff to be able to toilet them in time. It is crazy! The staff are all wonderful. It is the stupid system that lets the patients down. I cannot wait to get Mum moved to a home where all the carers are trained to give all the care, and the nurses are only needed to do the nursing only stuff. We have her name down at two private Homes and another that is yet to be built. There is not a lot more we can do but wait.

Hospitals are not good places for staying out of trouble. I cannot understand why they insist on making hospital the default place for having babies!